“Bob!”
I turned my head to see Renee and Mac Ackerman, two members of our birding group, walk into the lobby. Since we were all going to be having dinner together at the A&W across the street, they plopped down on the sofa next to my armchair and began to tell me what I’d missed when Shana and I had slipped out the hotel window to escape the media circus.
“That Chuck O’Keefe sure hates Shana,” Renee reported. “He kept yelling at the sheriff, saying that Shana was a manipulative schemer, and that he wasn’t fooled by her innocent grieving widow act. He said she had more irons in the fire than anyone knew about, and he wasn’t about to let her take OK Industries away from Jack’s real family.”
“OK Industries?”
“O’Keefe Industries, Bob,” Mac clarified for me. “It’s the family empire. They’ve got interests in just about every business in the state. Mills, real estate, grocery stores, banking.”
“Jack O’Keefe came a long way from his humble origins, that’s for sure,” Renee added. “I told the reporters that when Jack was in high school, all the girls were in love with him.” A distinct red blush colored her cheeks. “Including me.”
Mac threw his arm around his smiling wife and hugged her close. “That was a long time ago.”
“Yes, it was,” Renee agreed, wiping away a tear that had crept into her eyes when she’d said Jack’s name. “But it doesn’t make it any easier to see someone you know … dead.”
She sniffed and turned away to dig into her purse for a tissue.
“Yeah, if it hadn’t been for that Ben Graham, I don’t think the sheriff would have ever gotten Chuck to calm down, let alone leave the hotel. I guess he’s an old pal of Jack’s, and he’s known Chuck since he was a baby,” Mac continued. “Anyway, as soon as he told the reporters about Jack and Kami Marsden having an affair, they could have cared less about Chuck, I think. I guess a sex scandal beats an outraged stepson when you’re looking for headlines.”
“Say that again?”
Mac looked at me for a moment in confusion. “I guess a sex scandal—“
“No, not that part,” I interrupted him. “The part about Jack and Kami Marsden.”
“You mean about them having an affair?” Renee was back in the conversation. “Apparently it was common knowledge down here in Spring Valley. The sheriff didn’t seem surprised at all when Big Ben—he’s the mayor, you know,” she added for my benefit, “mentioned it. Of course, he didn’t come right out at first and say ‘affair.’ He said they had a ‘close, personal relationship,’ but of course, everyone could figure out what he wasn’t saying. And then the sheriff told the reporters that private affairs weren’t her concern, but murder was, and that she would be talking with Kami later today. Which I guess she did, according to the radio.”
Renee sniffed one last time into the tissue in her hand. “Poor Shana. I can’t imagine how she must feel.”
“Actually, I’m pretty hungry.”
We all looked up to see Shana and Bernie standing at the edge of the lobby. Renee’s cheeks blazed a brighter red in embarrassment, and Mac quickly rose from the sofa, pulling his wife up with him.
“I think we’ll go on across the street and find a table,” he said. “See you there.”
Renee ducked her head and made a beeline for the hotel’s front doors.
I watched Shana’s green eyes follow Renee’s back out the hotel entrance and had no clue what to say.
“Too bad Renee wasn’t in such a rush this morning to get to coffee,” Bernie commented as she and Shana crossed the lobby to me. “As I recall, we waited a good half-hour for her to get back from that twenty-four hour pharmacy with her allergy prescription. If it hadn’t been for her, we could have gotten an earlier start on our birding. I mean, really, how could the woman forget her allergy medication at home when it’s allergy season? Talk about being unprepared.”
As I motioned for Shana to precede me through the hotel doors, her eyes caught mine, a hint of a smile playing around the corners of her full lips, and I immediately knew what she was thinking. Without a moment’s hesitation, I could feel my memory flying back to the summer I was sixteen and Shana Lewis was the woman of my dreams …
“Talk about being unprepared,” I’d moaned, trying not to scratch at the million mosquito bites that were welling up all over my legs and arms.
“You didn’t have to go into the swamp with me,” Shana laughed. “I told you you weren’t properly dressed, but you just couldn’t stand the thought of me getting that Louisiana Waterthrush when you haven’t been able to find it all summer, could you?” She pulled a tube of bite balm out of her backpack. “That competitive streak is going to get you into trouble, Bob, mark my words. Now turn around.”
And then she proceeded to massage the whole tube into the backs of my stinging legs. For that one short moment, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.
But not because the balm soothed the itching.
Because Shana, who was driving me crazier every time I was near her, had her hands on me.
Not that it meant anything more to her than having to take care of a stupid, careless, proud and overconfident young birder. After all, she had been the one wearing the long-sleeved bug shirt and pants that covered almost every inch of her beautiful, ivory skin in mosquito-proof protection.
I, on the other hand, had been the “What NOT to wear for birding in August” model. Dressed in a tee-shirt and shorts, I was every mosquito’s fantasy feast—skin, skin, and more skin. I think it was a week before I could sit down without my legs tingling from the overwhelming need to itch. But even then, every time I thought about Shana touching me, I would have walked right back into that swamp had I been given the choice.
Yeah, I’d been unprepared back then.
Just like I was unprepared right now as the memory of that summer flooded over me, filling me with a yearning I couldn’t begin to describe.
“Are you going to stand there all evening with your mouth open catching flies, or are we going to dinner?” Bernie called back to me from the other side of the hotel’s entrance drive.
Only then did I realize I was frozen in the path of the hotel’s sliding doors. Shana, standing on the far curb with Bernie, also looked back at me, smiling, and I kicked myself in the head for so easily losing my sense of time and place, not to mention control of my libido. A whiff of White Shoulders lingered with me in the doorway, and I shook my head to clear it.
How about some focus, here, buddy? I asked myself. You want to help Shana, then get a grip, because the last thing she needs is a mutton-headed sixteen-year-old following her around.
A scream of brakes rounded the corner of the hotel as a news van headed straight for Shana and Bernie.
I was wrong.
The last thing Shana needed was an unexpected visit from the media.
Then I realized that the cameraman hanging out the window on the passenger side of the van wasn’t aiming his camera at Shana.
He was aiming it at me.